Final Project Assignment Sheet
Your final project has two stages. For the first, you will submit a short proposal for the project you would like to complete (due in week 9). Then, after receiving feedback on your proposal, you will submit your full final project (due finals week). You will also receive a grading rubric for your final project in week 10.
For your final project, you will be completing a mini ethnography of online culture. Very simply put, an ethnography is a study of culture based on observations; ethnography often involves immersing yourself in the culture you are studying. To do your ethnography, you will choose one small, specific corner of online culture to observe for roughly one week. During your observations, you should take notes, record information, and watch out for patterns, paying attention to things like: how users express themselves or interact, what kinds of content users share, and what tensions arise within online communities. Think of yourself as an anthropologist studying internet culture and/or phenomena.
After completing your observations, you will write a 2,000- to 3,000-word “report” (that is, an essay) describing what you saw in the corner of internet culture that you studied. Your report should explain what subculture you observed, how you completed your observations, and what notable trends you saw there. You should also offer an analysis of the trends you observed, describing what makes them meaningful and how they relate to our course topics. In your analysis, you should discuss at least 2 readings from our course. You can either use these readings to help explain the meaning behind your observations or you can use them to demonstrate how your observations actually complicate what we have discussed.
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